There’s a little concrete island between Flushing, Johnson, and Scott Avenues. Brooklyn forgot what to do with it, and whenever people scratch their heads over a space in Bushwick, the default answer is to turn it into a nightclub.

Long ago, it was Northside Tire Shop, and soon enough it will be a small club called XTC Bushwick (1277 Flushing Ave.), per June liquor license filings from XTC principal Maurizio Giuffrida confirmed in Community Board 1 minutes.

I spoke to co-owner Sheezy Kebab, fresh from a weeklong wedding in Lahore (“I’ve really been like all over, except Staten Island. We don’t like Staten Island.”). Kebab told me his plans for the space.

“My bigger ambitions are something like what Brooklyn Mirage used to be,” he said. Sheezy—who grew up in Fresh Meadows and now lives in Howard Beach (“a few feet from Brooklyn”)—got the idea of opening a club after DJing at Es Paradís in Ibiza.

Between the future and the far-back tire shop past, the place was Bushwick Triangle, a jazz bar that opened in 2023 to complement North Brooklyn jazz authority Ornithology (6 Suydam St.) and the even-nearer-by nightclub Red Pavilion (1241 Flushing Ave.). The Triangle closed without ceremony, around the same time as the Israeli-forward jazz bar Wilson Live (637 Wilson Ave.) on the opposite end of Bushwick. The Triangle’s former owner Nabil Cheikhali still runs the hookah lounge El Mekkah (277 Wyckoff Ave.) farther down the L.

On past nightlife antics, Sheezy had planned to host a rave at the erstwhile Bushwick Triangle last year. He later learned the Triangle was already double-booked for the night. “It is what it is,” he recalled thinking. “I’ve got to figure something out now.”

“It was just a miracle. We were going like crazy, thinking ‘What are we going to do?’ We have like 100-plus people who want to show up,” he said. “All of a sudden, this dude in a semi-truck pulled up, and we have this conversation. He’s having a little drink and I’m like, ‘What if we threw a rave on your truck?’”

“He said, ‘I think I might be able to do that.’” The trailer, parked outside SILO (90 Scott Ave.), turned out to be air-ride equipped and refrigerated, and ended up packed: “we had a good 45 people show up” in the back of the trailer. The next day, the driver left home for Louisiana.

Months later, Sheezy partnered with Giuffrida to plan XTC, which will open in the coming weeks, pending their liquor licensing and final renovations.

“Overall, EDM is the ideal,” said Sheezy, “but it’s not like the only thing we care about.”